Trends in COVID-19 prevalence and mortality: a year in review

TL;DR

This paper presents new analytical methods to examine the evolving patterns of COVID-19 prevalence and mortality across the 50 most affected countries in 2020, revealing key trends and anomalies.

Contribution

It introduces novel techniques including mortality trajectory classes, virulence matrices, and three-way inconsistency analysis for comprehensive COVID-19 trend analysis.

Findings

Identified five classes of mortality rate trajectories.

Detected structural similarities in mortality trends.

Highlighted Pakistan, the US, and UAE as most anomalous.

Abstract

This paper introduces new methods to study the changing dynamics of COVID-19 cases and deaths among the 50 worst-affected countries throughout 2020. First, we analyse the trajectories and turning points of rolling mortality rates to understand at which times the disease was most lethal. We demonstrate five characteristic classes of mortality rate trajectories and determine structural similarity in mortality trends over time. Next, we introduce a class of \emph{virulence matrices} to study the evolution of COVID-19 cases and deaths on a global scale. Finally, we introduce \emph{three-way inconsistency analysis} to determine anomalous countries with respect to three attributes: countries' COVID-19 cases, deaths and human development indices. We demonstrate the most anomalous countries across these three measures are Pakistan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.